Belittled and demeaned or the need to be someone big: Insect and Spider remedies

by Carolyn Burdet

Of
all the animals on earth, insects and spiders are almost universally disliked
by humans (only equalled by an archetypal fear of snakes, symbol of the
underworld of our intuition).

Spiders
make us jump in alarm, our heartbeat increases. Although the neurotoxin of a
spider bite is rarely fatal in humans, the phobia is intense. Panic can lead to
palpitations, even angina from psychosomatic anxiety in spider remedies. This
relates to the action of spider toxin on the central nervous system, which
causes pain, paralysis and increased heart rate. In spider bites the ill
effects take longer to take effect, with paralysis or sepsis.

Humans
revile insects for spreading disease; mosquito bites causing malaria, flies
spreading contamination. Dirty or filthy is an insect theme, especially in musca domestica, the bluebottle or house
fly which lives on excrement then indiscriminately lands on food. Maggots are
an image of rubbish and rotten food, and our response is disgust. This feeling
of disgust, saying ‘it’s rubbish’ to describe their circumstances, and the
indignant sense that they are ‘treated like dirt’, is very strong in the remedy
picture for musca domestica.

To
manage their sensitivity to dirt, people needing an insect remedy may be as
fastidious as an Arsenicum case, cleaning, tidying, vacuuming or hoovering
(insect behaviour is to suck up via the proboscis).

Demeaning and Humiliated

Insects
are regarded as an infestation to be exterminated (fleas, lice, bedbugs, flies,
mosquitoes). They are hard to get rid of and their persistence is annoying. A
wasp or mosquito near us feels harassing and in insect cases the person can
feel harrassed (malarial miasm), humiliated, insulted.

Ruthless

There
are one billion insects for every person on the planet. Insect colonies are
tireless, enslaving the workforce of the defeated colony in a ruthless bid to
colonise new territory and exploit them with cold acquisitive ambition. This is
a mode of success in corporate strategy in aspects of human life from fracking
mineral resources to copyright of seeds for food crops. So it’s no surprise if
insect consciousness increasingly presents in our cases.

Jonathan
Hardy, a homeopathically trained medical doctor based in England,
teaches on Spider and Insect remedies, presenting an orderly, structured,
sequence through the sub-kingdom. He notes that people who need an insect
remedy can often appear to be in the mineral kingdom, as structure and
organisation is very important to them.

Competition

Ambitious,
hard working, keen to improve and progress, to compensate for an inner sense of
inadequacy (which may be confused with a mineral sense of lacking capacity), in
insect cases achievement is a means to validation.

However,
in a case needing an insect remedy or a spider remedy, the issue of competition
will emerge as a key theme of any case in the animal kingdom. Someone is the
winner and someone is the loser. Mineral remedies can have performance issues,
attack and defence, but when the sense is of falling victim to a predator, or
taking out the competitor, this is animal kingdom fight for territory and
survival.

Even
so, it may not be obvious. A butterfly case may be preoccupied with their
identity. An Apis case may be busy keeping everyone in the household organised
to be productive. Social organisation may be a bigger theme than survival. But
at some point we glimpse a competitive edge. In insect cases this is often from
the point of view of feeling overlooked, belittled, badly treated or
disrespected.

Disrespect and Deceit

Spider
remedy cases will not tolerate disrespect, they respond to an imbalance of
power or unfair treatment by a determination to get even. The defining feature
of spider remedies is a provocative and
irreverent sense of humour, using pranks and practical jokes to ‘get one over’
their victim. The web that traps a spider’s prey is sticky, almost invisible.
The ‘deceit’ of the spider remedies may derive from the artifice of the
intricate web of ultra violet threads a garden spider will spin to reflect the
pattern of a flower to lure an unsuspecting insect, while a ground dwelling
spider disguises its hole as a trap with leaves or twigs and jumps out to catch
its prey.

Restlessness

Spider
remedies are internally restless, nervy, they cannot sit still, fidgeting, with
restless legs and needing to keep their hands busy (knitting is a spider
hobby). Sensitive to noise and sounds, spider remedies feel the vibrations
reverberating through their body. Spider remedies have a sense of rhythm, an
inclination to dance and jump around, but there is also lassitude and
prostration (modality: Better for lying
down). The rhythmic quality extends to periodicity of ailments, a headache
recurring annually or monthly.

Insects
are constantly on the move, buzzing around. People who need an insect remedy
can have an internal sensation of buzzing with energy, constantly busy, working
hard, productively to achieve goals, or wired on hectic fruitless activity.

Ambitious to achieve

A
spider remedy characteristic is that they want to be someone big. Insect remedies are ambitious to achieve,
materialistic with a fear of poverty. Insects live in highly organised social
colonies with defined roles; they can build structures and ‘cities’ or consume
and destroy everything in their wake. In people who need an insect remedy, this
is expressed as a materialistic streak. They can be avid consumers of the
latest must-have gadgets and take care over their appearance, seen to be
wearing fashionable brands, using hair styling products or make up.

Transformation

Ambition
is driven by an innate sense of inferiority, they need to keep pushing for
more, even when successful.There is
a continual ambition for self-improvement. A key theme in insect cases is
change, transition or complete transformation of life circumstances. Their
hunger to progress involves a transformation from a lowly earthbound grub to
taking flight – the point where their life, or their project takes off. They
can be ruthless in marching towards this goal.

Power struggle

Insect
and spider remedies have issues with control and domination. Wasps lay their
eggs inside other creatures such as caterpillars, ants enslave other colonies
of ants. This may explain why some insect remedies have the delusion of being
‘under superhuman control’.

Whereas
spider remedies often have a power struggle in a relationship, and may defer
decisions to a more powerful partner, as seen in the delusion ‘head belongs to
another’.

Male
spiders are smaller than the female, the theme of bigger than me / smaller than
me, more powerful than me, is key in spider. Insect cases can feel small or
insignificant; they have an inferiority complex, they feel belittled or
worthless by someone’s treatment of them.

In
spider remedies there is a power struggle and the spider impulse is to turn the
tables or take revenge on the person overpowering them. Being bigger relates to
a peculiar delusion of enlargement of body parts in spider cases.

Neglected or Possessive

Insect
remedies may feel their parental care was cold and unemotional. Apis is an
exception; honey bee larvae are nurtured by worker bees and the insect sexual
instinct is sublimated into duty in Apis. Other insect remedies tend to feel
neglected by their parents.

Spiders
give parental care and male spiders sacrifice themselves as food for their
young. In human relationships this ‘self sacrifice’ can be bound up in
over-involvement. The close bond can mean the child has to escape the
possessive love of the parent. A spider remedy (specifically black widow
spider) may be relevant in a case where the parent is needy, demanding,
controlling and manipulative.

Animal
remedy cases will express aspects of the predator and their prey. Spiders tread
warily during the courtship dance, to get tangled in the web risks bondage,
powerlessness, paralysis, having the life juice sucked out of them. Yet they
cannot resist getting involved, and once involved they struggle to extricate
themselves from the situation.

In
spider and insect remedies there is restlessness and high sexual energy. Insect
sex drive is intense but it can be a casual fling. In spider remedies, what
starts as a need for constant attention, can become manipulative. Alize
Timmerman describes the dynamic of possessiveness in the spider subkingdom –
the possessive partner feels intense despair that they can’t live without the
other person. They develop psychosomatic symptoms from panic, with gripping pains
around the heart, or M.E exhaustion, or depression. The need for attention and
sexual drama is destructive. If their partner tries to leave them, the
manipulative ‘victim’ declares “I’ll take him for everything he’s got”. Latrodectus mactans, black widow spider,
can be a remedy to release both parties from the destructive holding pattern of
a vengeful and acrimonious divorce.